In exploring the Magnificat, something I found interesting was that a single composer, Charles Stanford, set the text in every key. At first thought, I simply wondered why he would do that. But today’s class gave me a better understanding. The Magnificat was very popular, performed in church services repeatedly. The popularity and repetition of the piece called for some variation.
Before listening to several of Stanford’s compositions, I was under the impression that they would all be very similar, the same rhythms, melodies, meter, etc. Upon listening I found that I was quite wrong. Each piece is completely unique in more ways than just the key. One quality of uniqueness that especially stood out to me was the texture of each piece. The number of voices and the layering of voices can really affect a piece of music. Each piece had a unique mixture of high and low voices throughout. Another element unique to each piece was the placement of emphasis (accents) on words as well as the placement of crescendos and decrescendos. By emphasizing different parts of the texts throughs accents and volume, the meaning of the words change almost change in the way they are interpreted, which is very interesting.